Sincerely: Inside Kali Uchis’ Most Intimate Album Yet

In a world of musical trends that come and go faster than a TikTok scroll, Kali Uchis has always been an outlier, steadfast in her vision, yet never still. With her new album Sincerely, released on May 9th, she invites listeners into what she describes as her “most honest, existential, and beautiful” body of work yet. It's a sweeping, emotionally raw record, born not out of hype, but out of a private reckoning.

From the start, Uchis has made her mark by refusing to be boxed in. Raised between Virginia, USA and Colombia, her bicultural upbringing shaped an eclectic musical palate, fusing soul, R&B, Latin pop, and vintage doo-wop to create her now iconic sound. From the dreamy, genre-melting debut album Isolation to the Spanish-language Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios), she’s always created on her own terms. But Sincerely feels different. It’s the sound of someone who has lived, loved, lost, and then chosen softness anyway.

A quietly devastating centerpiece of the album is “All I Can Say,” a song Uchis wrote spontaneously in the car en route to the studio. That immediacy bleeds into every line. The track pulses with restrained melancholy, sitting somewhere between R&B nostalgia and modern soul, her voice almost trembling with the weight of what’s left unsaid. The accompanying music video, while visually understated, is emotionally potent: Uchis moves slowly through a dusky, washed-out world of muted pinks and deep shadows, like she’s walking through a memory. There's a tactile softness to the entire production, gentle camera work, flowing fabrics, and close-ups that linger just long enough to catch a flicker of vulnerability. She’s not performing heartbreak, she’s surviving it in real time.

Elsewhere on the album, tracks like “Sunshine & Rain…” and “ILYSMIH” (an abbreviation for I Love You So Much It Hurts) expand the emotional landscape. The latter is particularly intimate: a tribute to her newborn son, whom she welcomed with partner and fellow artist Don Toliver last year. The song drips with warmth and gratitude, but never veers into sentimentality, it’s love in its purest form, with no filter, no irony.

That’s what makes Sincerely stand out in a crowded field of overproduced records, it doesn’t try to be trendy, or even broadly appealing. It’s not interested in virality. It’s Kali Uchis as she is now: vulnerable, wiser, and more assured than ever before. She's still the genre-shifting visionary we met a decade ago, but there’s a new emotional depth here, one that doesn’t ask for your attention, but quietly commands it.

Later this year, she’ll take Sincerely on the road for a 24-date North American tour. But this doesn’t feel like a victory lap. It feels more like a letter, sealed with tears, written without ego, addressed to anyone who’s ever had to rebuild themselves from the inside out. 

Written by Vanessa Twerefou